Pack Your Lipstick

The travel industry is just waking up to the economic power of women, says Marybeth Bond, writer, editor, speaker and women's travel guru extraordinaire.

She would know. Her female-focused travel guide, "50 Best Girlfriend Getaways in North America," sold through its first print run in six weeks.

Released in the spring of 2007, Bond's guide is hardly Lonely Planet material. It's organized not by chronology or geography, but by theme.

One chapter outlines top spots to take your girlfriends for a big birthday blowout, while another suggests resorts and spas to host an all-girls pampered reunion.

Bond organized her guide thematically to facilitate how many women think about travel.
"Maybe not on the surface, but women understand the transformational power of travel," Bond explained. "Women tend to travel to help them through life's passages. They go when they've been dumped, after a divorce, a bout with cancer. [...] I got over my own mother's death by hiking in the Colorado Rockies with my girlfriends," she said. "Travel really is a chrysalis for change."

What women want

"Typical guidebooks give too much information," Bond said. "My book doesn't list everything to do in a city. What I tried to do is act as a filter [...]. Instead of saying, 'Here's a store you should go to,' I tried to say, 'Here's a good neighborhood to walk around in.'"

According to Bond, women travelers are tuned in to some key factors: safety, service, lighting, noise, and decor. For this reason, she took care to weed out rotten elements.
Bond compiled her listings based on personal experience. "I've visited, hiked, biked, eaten, shopped, slept, you name it, in 90 percent of the places in the book, and the remaining two spots my sister did," she laughed.

Bond has backpacked around the world by herself, edited six collections of women-penned travel essays, been quoted in the nation's most widely-read newspapers and dispensed travel advice from Oprah's couch.

As her first travel guide did so well, a second is due out the spring of 2008, this time titled "Best Girlfriends Getaways Worldwide."

"I've got figures that say the average adventure traveler is a 47-year-old woman!" Bond exclaimed. "Women account for 70 percent of the adventure travel industry, and it's no wonder when you consider that the number of tour operators that are now working exclusively with women has risen 300 percent in the past 10 years."

Fighting fear with information

Teresa Rodriguez Williamson - author of "Fly Solo: The 50 Best Places on Earth for a Girl to Travel Alone" and founder of women's travel Web site TangoDiva.com - uses online quizzes to maintain contact with her readers. She's able to take a grassroots pulse of women travelers.

"We've found that the number one reason women don't travel alone is fear. They fear for their safety," she said. "But this is what I find so interesting: They can't really say what it is they fear. The highest scoring answers aren't rape or mugging. Instead, responders say things like, 'I don't know what to do when I get off the plane.'"

"Fly Solo" isn't stuffed with hotel or museum listings. That's because Rodriguez Williamson was mindful of the fact that today's women have many resources at their fingertips for finding travel information, like TangoDiva, on which more than 6,000 women swap travel advice on password-protected user forums.

Through her Web site and her book, Rodriguez Williamson hopes to empower women to tackle the globe. "I want to say to women, 'Give me a few days of your life and let me transform it by putting you on a plane,'" she said. "I promise you will come back a changed person."

Dealing with cat calls

Beth Whitman also wants to encourage women to travel the world solo. Her book, "Wanderlust and Lipstick: The Essential Guide for Women Traveling Solo," was published in March 2007.

Even though Whitman has motorcycled from Seattle to Panama and backpacked the Pacific Rim by herself, she avoided pushing specific places as women-friendly in her guide. Instead, she filled its pages with advice to arm women with travel tips applicable to wherever they might wish to roam.

For example, every woman who travels alone will have to deal with sexual innuendos.
"We think, 'Someone said hi to me, I should say hi back,'" Whitman says. "But if you do that, if you say hello, you open yourself up to contact and it snowballs from there.
That's when the questions start: Do you have a boyfriend? Where are you going?"

"You don't have to engage with everyone you come across," Whitman stressed. "At home, you don't feel this need. If you're walking by a construction project in the U.S. and a man calls out, you don't stop to say hello."

One is the loneliest number

When she isn't traveling or writing, Whitman is teaching. She leads workshops in the Seattle area that teach women the ins and outs of travel.

"Women are social creatures," Whitman said, "and their biggest fear in traveling alone is that they will feel completely isolated. In reality, that's the furthest thing from the truth. Solo travelers are like magnets. They attract one another. When I travel on my own, I become bolder than I normally am. I go up and insert myself into tour groups. I say, 'I'm traveling alone. Can I sit with you?' People always say yes."

The Real Faces of Women Travelers

In the year that Elizondo Griest's "100 Places Every Woman Should Go" graced bookstore shelves, Griest traveled the country giving author talks.

"These haven't been traditional book talks," she said. "They've turned into interactive workshops about how to travel as women."

Griest was surprised by the crowds her book drew. In Portland, Maine, she said, 45 people attended her author talk.

Some of the women making up those crowds were already familiar with her travel memoir, "Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing and Havana," or the numerous appearances her name has made in the pages of Travelers' Tales anthologies. Other women attended the readings because they were travelers hoping to pass a few hours with a fellow globetrotter.

However, across the country, the majority of women showing up to hear Elizondo Griest talk about travel were women who hadn't traveled yet, but dreamed of doing so.

"Most of the women were between 40 and 70 years old. They were recently divorced or empty nesters. [...]" she said. "They wanted to travel but were scared. They wanted to know how to take the first step."

This article originally appeared on GoNomad.com, a travel Web site based in South Deerfield.